The Other Portland

It’s poor, it’s dangerous, it’s growing like crazy—and it’s more important than ever.

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS: Guy Dale uses the bike lane to make his way up Southeast 162nd Avenue in East Portland, where it’s not uncommon to see people in wheelchairs using roadways because the sidewalks are inadequate or missing. - IMAGE: Darryl James

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In case you didn’t get the invite, Portland is an endless
party in a shining urban utopia where everyone has a $1,000 bicycle,
eats locally sourced gourmet dishes from food carts and is blindingly,
self-consciously white. It’s Paris in the 1920s, but with iPhones.
Portland is not just a noun, it’s an adjective for good government and
livability, smart planning and the next hip thing.

Well, wake up. There’s another Portland you should know about, one unknown even to many longtime locals.

It’s an expanse of
the city without a single Zipcar spot or independent microbrewery, where
you’ll see more pajama bottoms than skinny jeans. It’s a landscape of
chain link and surface parking that, by contrast, makes 82nd Avenue look
positively gentrified. It’s a cookie-cutter residential sprawl so
devoid of landmarks, public spaces and commercial centers that some
residents simply call it “The Numbers.”

It’s where you can
walk a quarter-mile without finding a crosswalk (assuming you can find a
paved sidewalk). You’d have to go even farther to find a bus stop or
MAX station. Forget about a city-maintained bike rack—in 50 square
miles, there are only three.

It is, however, the
most diverse place in Oregon. You may find yourself struggling to read
the signs on local businesses, unless you’re fluent in Spanish or
Vietnamese. If you see white people, two things might be true: The
trucker hat isn’t meant to be ironic, or they speak Russian.

This place is poor, and relatively dangerous.

Median household
income is at least 23 percent lower than in the city as a whole, and the
official poverty rates are worse than almost anywhere else in the metro
area. Violent crime is up. The mortality rate is the highest in the
county.

It’s East Portland, the city’s frontier.

More than a quarter
of the city’s residents live here, separated from the rest by Interstate
205, a physical and psychological barrier more divisive than the
Willamette River. If East Portland were its own city—and in many ways,
it is—it’d be the third-largest in Oregon, with 150,000 people, roughly
equal in population to Eugene and Salem.

And now, as the city
heads into an election season that will be more competitive than most,
and with new attention paid to social disparities across the country,
East Portland is emerging as a political force.

All three major
candidates for mayor are portraying themselves as the new champions of
the neighborhoods east of I-205. New Seasons Market co-founder Eileen
Brady promises greater investment in East Portland. Charlie Hales, a
former city commissioner, talks about the lack of sidewalks and
delivering East Portland its “birthright.” And state Rep. Jefferson
Smith (D-East Portland) has beaten the drum for the area since moving
there in 2007 to run for the Legislature.

The political attention comes, in part, because East Portland’s problems can no longer be ignored.

“Crime has gone up.
The school system does not know how to handle the influx of children of
color,” says the Rev. W.G. Hardy Jr., whose church draws hundreds of
black families from East Portland. “[Politicians are] talking about
livable cities, with modes of transportation—bus, bike, pedestrian, car.
But we don’t have that. They’re talking about healthy grocery stores
within walking distance. We don’t have that.”

Altruism alone doesn’t explain the mayoral candidates’ new eastward focus. There’s also a stark political cartography.

EASTERN PROMISES: Centennial Community Association President Tom Lewis says city projects like new parks and bike lanes aren’t always welcomed by longtime East Portlanders who mistrust City Hall.

IMAGE: Darryl James

“Even a naive
politician has got to admit that 25 percent of Portland’s population is
going to have a voice someday,” says Tom Lewis, a carpenter who heads
the Centennial Community Association. “They’ve got to go there.”

When he ran for mayor
in 2008, Sam Adams won virtually every precinct in the city except for
those east of I-205. And he didn’t simply lose in East Portland
precincts. In many, he got thumped.

Hales and Brady
launched their campaigns against Adams with appeals to those East
Portland voters. Now that Adams won’t seek re-election, they’ve held on
to their eastside strategy.

That’s why you’ll
soon be hearing about East Portland as never before—and why it’s
important to understand what is true, and what is myth, about the least
“Portlandy” part of Portland.